As business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) software become increasingly pervasive, vendors of these technologies have begun to see the value of incorporating into their budgeting, financial reporting, analytics, and similar applications some of the capabilities that are popular in the consumer world. This trend has the potential to substantially expand BPM software’s usefulness to managers throughout the enterprise.
Requiring managers outside the finance function to use proprietary software for their budgeting and planning activities can reduce the quality of those managers’ budgets. They have plenty to do running their niche of the business and may resist dedicating much time to achieving proficiency in a technology they don’t see as core to their job. Its familiarity, at least at a baseline level, to businesspeople in almost every industry is part of the reason for Microsoft Excel’s success.
Ever since “BPM” was identified as a category of business software, vendors have been searching for a way to simplify the look and feel of their products in order to encourage nonfinance budget managers to use BPM tools to their fullest. The first, and most common, attempt at a standard and easy user interface came in the form of the spreadsheet itself. Several vendors developed Excel front ends, in which their performance management functionality was accessed through options added into Excel menus or formulas that expanded the power of standard spreadsheets. However, in many cases this approach has fallen short of the ideal of full use of BPM features companywide. One explanation is that while finance people adore Excel, operations managers are far less familiar with some of the more complicated activities required to develop solid, defensible budgets within spreadsheets.
Now, many vendors are turning their attention beyond spreadsheets to consumer technologies that promise to improve both user interfaces and actual functionality for ease of use and better decision-making among operations managers. Collaboration technologies are drawing interest among some software makers. As one article in the June issue of BPM Magazine explains, the future of performance management applications may incorporate Web 2.0 technologies, so that teams of people could discuss forecasts and concerns with the finance department as they developed their budgets, then could upload budgets (along with commentary and explanations) into a centralized, transparent corporate database. Such a solution would have the potential to substantially improve not only the efficiency, but also the accuracy, of each step of the budgeting process.
Even more widespread over the past couple of years has been vendor attention to incorporating search functionality into business intelligence applications. The ultimate goal of adding search to BI or BPM software is to enable users to search for information both in databases and in other types of files (e.g., in spreadsheets, on Web pages, in Word documents) from within their BI or BPM software suite. Previous issues of BPM Express have reported on the addition of search technologies (usually Google technologies) into various BI and BPM applications.
A survey by Ventana Research that is also covered in the June issue of BPM Magazine found that 34 percent of organizations believe linking this “semistructured” and “unstructured” information with BI data is very important, while 50 percent believe it’s somewhat important. Why? The same survey found that most respondents think integrating BI and search technologies will help them make better-informed decisions (for 53 percent, this is the most important benefit of this integration), as well as make decisions faster.
The ERP vendors have been understandably sidetracked over the past year with efforts to fully integrate the BPM products they’ve purchased into their own enterprise applications, so much of the recent noise about extending performance management to operations managers has been coming from smaller players. However, once ERP vendors get their integration efforts under control, consumer technologies may begin to gain more of their attention as well.
When that happens, performance management technologies may finally extend as far into the organization as vendors and consultants feel they should. A Facebook- or Google-inspired front end is sure to make finance software less intimidating. And the more budget managers take advantage of BPM’s full capabilities, the better organizations’ BPM processes are sure to be.
